Letter to the Editor(Fast food cultures)

Dear Editor,
                                  Fast food threatens our physical and mental health

      Contrary to what your correspondent J. Carnes asserts (Fast food - a danger to traditional food cultures), fast food cultures definitely changes people's attitude towards food and eating, and damages our traditional food cultures. Nowadays, people praise fast food cultures for its efficiency and trendiness. However, these cultures are certainly not good to our health, and are indeed threats to traditional food cultures.

      "We're losing our taste for real food." What J. Carnes wrote is, unfortunately, the truth in everyone's lives. When we have fast food in the shop, our tongues gradually discover that the piece of chicken we are chewing does not have the favour of a real chicken; or the taste of the soup we drink seems to be a bit different from the taste of its ingredients, or we are not even told about its composition. Time flies, and our tongues, strangely, accept the changes fast food cultures brought to us. Worse still, our next generation do not even know their real taste! This is devastatingly horrifying. Never will the situation change if we stick to fast food cultures.

      Food additives, monosodium glutamate, modified food...... All these are harmful to our health. However, fast food have all these unpleasant substances. Not only this, fast food is particularly oily and salty. Children are obese from eating high-fat, high-calorie burgers, pizzas and greasy fries. However, this stuff is addictive. And don't forget the diseases that follow: heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, and so forth. Therefore, we should not follow the trend of unhealthy fast food cultures.

      Another highlight on fast food cultures is "fast". Fast isn't wrong, but too fast is undoubtedly wrong. How does it affect our lives? Often, if we eat too fast, stomach ache is inevitable. This is one of the bad impacts. The other one is that the time for gathering with families and friends will be lessened. In the past, having lunch is a great time for people to relax and talk with their beloved ones. However, with limited time, how can people talk to each other in the fast food shop freely now? They would rather eat faster than be stared by the standing people's fierce eyes who are waiting for seats. In this situation, relaxation is impossible for people.

      From these, we can see that fast food cultures threatens both physical and mental health. In my view, changing our food habit can tackle this problem. Saying "no" to fast food cultures and preparing our own lunchboxes are some good examples of solution to the problem. While doing so, we can also arouse people's attention - remind them to do the same. By this way, we can fight against the problem of fast food cultures.

Yours faithfully,
Chris Wong